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Hello, I'm Fiona Firth and I'm a senior lecturer in the
School of Surveying and Planning. I teach mainly on
undergraduate modules, in particular to the Real Estate
Management and the Property Planning Development
students. I have ten years of experience in practice, mainly
in planning and development fields, before starting here.
I now teach on a lot of the undergraduate programmes,
sometimes doing odd lectures in modules, but also
leading three of the modules. I teach in the third year
a module called Property Strategy and Funding, which is
a lot to do with developers and investors and how they
interact with each other in partnerships. We look at lots of
case studies and we look at the idea of government
intervention through public-private partnerships.
I'm the module leader for the Dublin field trip, which takes
place in January and all of the second year undergraduate
students go on that field trip. What they have to do for
the field trip is work together in groups so all of the
different surveying disciplines work together as a team
and produce a project which they have to present – that's
a very good experience for them because they are having
to tailor their experiences with that of the other group members;
they are having to find out how it is to work as a team
and encourage each other; and then the final presentation
is good experience from the work point of view in terms
of presenting themselves. Another contrasting module
that I work on is Skills for the Built Environment, and that's
a first year module which is taken by our residential
property students. And the idea of the module there is
that they experience lots of different elements of work
that they'll be involved in throughout the rest of our
course so they're getting a very good first experience in
practicing the different skills that they are going to need.
So we deal with things like presentations; group work;
we do some maths and measuring; we also look at
putting together reports and essay writing – all these sorts
of things. So it gives them a very good chance as a first go
to have a go at these experiences, perhaps get it wrong
and find out how to improve it for later assessments.